Intel P965: MSI P965 Platinum and ECS PX1 Extreme

Overclocking Performance



We have already reviewed the overclocking capabilities of each board in detail during our review of the boards' feature sets if additional information is desired. The ASUS P5B-E 1.02G is still the best overclocking board in our reviews to date although we are presenting initial results that show the ASUS P5B-Deluxe to be the best P965 overclocking board available. Our MSI and ECS motherboards perform the worst of our current review units. While the ECS PX1 is limited to a 366FSB in the BIOS, the MSI has options up to 500FSB that hopefully can be reached in a stable fashion in the near future. The MSI board actually topped out at 405FSB but performance was much improved at the 375FSB rate we are reporting.

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The ASUS P5B-E 1.02G and ASUS P5B-Deluxe perform the best overall due to their excellent overclocking capability. In our application benchmarks that tend to be very CPU intensive we see the benefits of overclocking as our Nero Recode test shows an improvement of 17% on average with our WinRAR tests showing upwards of a 37% increase in performance.

In our Sandra memory results we see the Gigabyte GA-965P-DS3 still having the highest Unbuffered results although the MSI P965 Platinum is extremely close. This test result translates directly to its class leading performance in most of our benchmarks. We also have to commend MSI for very consistent performance across the board in stock scores and the ECS faired quite well considering its memory performance limitations. To be fair to the other boards and our users, the memory we are using has a great deal to do with the ECS board staying close in the stock scores as typical timings of 4-4-4-12 or 5-5-5-15 would affect most scores about 1%~4% on average.

In our gaming benchmarks we see differences of 7% in Quake 4 and up to 38% in Battlefield 2 when overclocking. This trend shows a definite improvement in the CPU/GPU balanced titles with little improvement in a title like Quake 4 that can become GPU limited even at 1280x1024. This basically holds true for the balance of our games as overclocking will improve performance to a certain degree but the GPU is the biggest factor in most games today.